More flexible handling of .md files in Rules

Ideas Feature Requests
1

Feature request for product/service

Cursor IDE

Describe the request

Right now it seems that Cursor automatically detects specific .md files and interprets them as rules. Examples are CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md.

We happen to develop AI agents ourselves and as part of that we also ship an AGENTS.md file as part of their deployed workspaces.

The problem we have is that Cursor will automatically interpret this AGENTS.md as its own Rule, without any possibility of removing that Rule other than deleting the file itself. (The trash icon on the Rule will actually delete the file from the workspace).

Right now there are three option of when to apply that .md file as a rule (see screenshot)

  1. Always applied
  2. Agent decides when to apply
  3. Apply to specific Files & Folders → this will also alter the file itself

It would be amazing to have a 4th option “Never applied” or a way of removing this from the Rules without deleting the file.

(PS. Long time Cursor power user, absolutely love the product - amazing work and also cool update with v3!)

Screenshot / Screen Recording

Screenshot from 2026-04-10 12-12-04.png
Screenshot from 2026-04-10 12-12-04.png580Ă—110 11.4 KB

4

Thanks for the kind words and for the detailed feature request!

Good news: you can actually solve this today using .cursorignore. If you add AGENTS.md to a .cursorignore file in your workspace root, Cursor will skip it when loading rules, so it won’t show up in your Rules list, and you won’t risk accidentally deleting it.

One caveat: .cursorignore also excludes the file from codebase indexing/context, so Cursor won’t use AGENTS.md for things like codebase search either.

6

Amazing, thanks for sharing - it worked!